The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (15 page)

Janie knew somewhere inside her that Drew loathed himself or didn't really love her enough or was gay
(themed meals
?). But this part of her remained unconnected to the other part, which gazed at him, in his beauty and bearable kindness and told herself to settle down if he didn't want to do it for a while and quit being such a trollop.

I
N
O
CTOBER
,
THE
adapter began fritzing out again. Janie spent a week jiggling the cord and remaining frozen, until some motion, a tick, a yawn, a sneeze, would cut the connection and she would curse very quietly, or sometimes louder, and once she even shoved Clawed Rains hard enough to send him thudding against the entertainment center.

Back she went to Charlie Song, but she arrived too early and had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the road crew, still joyously ripping up the street. One of the men straddled a jackhammer and flipped a switch and suddenly the blade bit into the asphalt and the great tool sent violent shudderings through his body.

Charlie Song appeared a few minutes later, short and disheveled in the clattering sun. Wisps of black hair lay across his scalp. The flesh around his mouth was finely creased. He was nonplussed to find Janie waiting for him and entered the shop with his hands brushing the air before him, as if to clear away cobwebs.

Janie pulled out the adapter and Charlie began his nimble inspection; his eyes looked pained at the state of the cord, whitish at the rim of the coupler, like old licorice.

How you hold? You use rough?

Janie said, No.

Charlie squinted. You hold funny?

Well of course she did hold the machine funny, and this did lead, rather directly, to a severe bending of the cord. But she saw no reason to confess all this to Charlie Song.

The receipt says your work is under warranty, she said.

At the word
warranty
, Charlie shied away. His eyes welled into little pools of sullenness.

October, he said.

Janie nudged her boobs against the glass counter. The receipt says 90 days.

Charlie smiled miserably. He did not look at Janie, nor especially at her boobs, but carried the adapter with its cord dragging behind and set it down on his worktable and disappeared into the back of the shop. He returned with his spool of solder and hunkered down before his sadder gun while Janie pretended not to notice. There was a delicious, excruciating aspect to the tableau.

The components in Charlie's shop seemed now to be replicating: resistors and volt relays and hard drives in their shiny silver antimagnetized baggies and tangles of taffy-colored wire. The display rack nearest the door was stuffed
with CD-ROMs covered in—Janie was almost sure of this—bird shit. On one shelf sat a small portable TV monitor. There, in the watery green light, was a man hunched over a desk, with a young woman looming over him. It took a moment for Janie to realize she was being filmed.

Charlie Song worked intently. He snipped the coupler and stripped the wires and his hands, his nicked, runty hands, moved with an extraordinary attention that seemed to Janie the most obvious and overlooked aspect of love. Charlie peered down at the thin silver bridge he had installed. The fissure was barely visible, but it was there, enough to cut the current. He let his fingertip linger on the spot.

On went the sadder gun and Charlie jumped up from his desk. He returned a few moments later with a jar of water, into which he dipped the old sponge, and quite suddenly there was music in the shop as well, a Bach fugue, a mournful drift of violins, and Charlie dabbed the gun against the sponge and gathered solder at the tip and Janie felt a sudden trill in the place where her thighs met. She understood now what they had been up to earlier: a kind of spat, a kind of foreplay. Coils of smoke rose up from the dissolving solder. Charlie sneezed, delicately, three times in a row. Janie had to restrain herself from touching his cheek.

T
HAT NIGHT SHE
went back on the promise she had made to herself, which was not to touch Drew till Halloween, nor to entice or seduce or cajole, but to let him come to her. Earlier, at Taco Loco, Drew drank not one, but two beers, and his mood had been buoyant as he discussed a new funding source for his truancy seminar. She was preoccupied by his breath, its bouquet of yeast and poblano chiles.

Now she slipped into bed in her camisole and reached out to touch the muscles along his spine. She was careful not to linger, to carry on her chatter, and Drew listened to her and did not tense up and he smelled sweet and gamy and his hair was just oily enough to shine in the dull light from the alley and he had, after all, drunk that second beer, so she let her hand slip down his back, then lip beneath the band of his boxers, at which point Drew murmured, Do you want to cuddle?

This was his new ploy: cuddling.

It technically fulfilled the requirements of affection while providing none of the actual benefits. For Drew, cuddling meant she could spoon him, or he could spoon her, but if certain unspoken boundaries were crossed—say, playing with his earlobe, or making a sudden grab for his scrotum—then this was no longer cuddling but had become
pressure
, which was bad, oh very bad that pressure, the source of all their problems. It caused Drew to tense
and begin speaking as if he were addressing a grant committee.

Still, she took the offer to cuddle. She took it and wrapped her body around his and stroked his shoulders in a manner she hoped would be deemed innocuous while simultaneously triggering the elusive chain reaction that would wake the blood within him. She hugged Drew from behind.

Her pubic bone, her poor, neglected pubic bone, pressed against his tailbone. His hair smelled like an herb garden. She kissed the back of his neck and let her lips linger until she felt the shifting muscles. He was turned on. At last, he wanted her and she reached for him, tugged at his hipbone, and the straps of her camisole slipped free and her fingers skimmed his belly on the way down. But suddenly something clamped onto her wrist and she heard Drew say, Damn it.

His body was a pale outline in the dark.

We talked about this, he said.

Get away, Janie said, sobbing a little.

Which he did, of course, the clever bastard, and slept on the couch and in the morning sent Clawed Rains in as an emissary. Then he brought her breakfast on a tray.

I don't want breakfast, Janie said.

What do you want? he said.

She tipped the tray and watched skim milk soak her big
stupid tits.

Why are you doing this to me?

Drew sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

I don't know, he said quietly.

Are we ever going to touch again?

Give me time, Janie. I'm going through some changes.

What sort of changes? The sort that involve wanting to have sex with men?

Drew ran a hand through his hair, which still smelled like herbs. No, Janie. Nothing like that. I just don't feel . . . He mumbled a word that sounded like
sassy
.

You don't feel sassy? Is that what you said?

Sexy
, Drew said. He rubbed his face with his hands. I don't feel sexy.

Janie wanted very much to laugh. She wanted both to laugh and to run her tongue along the rim of his nostrils, which were flaring deliciously.

Is this some kind of joke, she said. Not sexy? You can't possibly, do you have any idea, my God, you are one of the most, honey, look in the mirror.

Drew shrugged. I just don't feel it.

Well then let me feel it. I can prove it to you. She reached for his shoulder. We can take care of this right now.
Please
.

Drew refused to look at her. Instead, he began setting the overturned dishes back on the tray. That's not how it works, honey. You have to feel it from the inside.

Janie wanted to tell him: No no. Wrong! That
is
how it works. Our sense of beauty comes from outside, from the world. We aren't born feeling desirable, you lummox. Please. Let me help you.

But his shoulder had gone dead under her touch and now he was flashing her his adorable sulky underlip and asking: Can't we just cuddle? Please, baby. Don't give up on me. I'll get it back.

J
ANIE WOULD REALIZE
only later that she had provoked the third visit to Charlie Song. It was the holiday season, which meant naked trees and slush and a walloping case of seasonal affective disorder. She'd taken Drew to visit her folks for Christmas, which was really two trips, one to the Mother, the other to the Father, who, though technically cohabitating, lived on separate floors of a camp house on Squam Lake and did not, as a rule, speak.

Her mother had survived cancer, but the dark fog of decay had left her prone to eccentricity. She tottered down the shore flanked by her Shih Tzus, cussing at the speedboats. She despaired of the rustling spruce. Winter had flayed the mountains around the lake and layered the roads with mulch. The silver bass slept in beds of frozen mud.

Drew was magnificent. He chopped wood and beat hoarfrost off the granite shingles and helped her father manage the terrifying new gas heater. He lumbered about
in a mackinaw and a stocking cap with a look of dumb radiant industry. Her mother and father adored Drew. They gazed at him with abject lust and competed for his attention and seemed to regard Janie as the lucky but not-quite-appreciative-enough recipient of a Lotto jackpot. They made loud dithering comments about future family vacations. Eagerly, creepily, they transitioned from potential in-laws to groupies.

On the day after Christmas, Janie woke to the whinny of floorboards. The Mother laughed like a loon, delirious, absurd. Janie assumed she was being tossed by dreams. But then the Father produced a groan and the song of bed-springs began and Janie decided she might just puke, that puking would certainly be justified in this instance. Drew lay on his back. His face was puffed a bit and softened around the cheekbones. She peeled back the comforter and watched his peaceful breathing. She imagined him flouncing through the Scottish Highlands in a kilt, with nothing underneath, letting the fields of heather fan across his lovely, pointless boner. Then she started packing.

Back in their apartment, Janie drank vodka tonics and tried not to cry. Clawed Raines mewed for attention and slid his gray gums along her knuckles. Janie tossed him away. But Clawed jumped back up and began to knead her lonesome boobs and rather than comforting her, this persistence made Janie furious and she flicked the cat, hard,
with her index finger, right on his spongy little snout, which caused him to sneeze convulsively and this caused Janie to weep convulsively and it began to snow outside and the wind howled and the phone rang and rang. She yanked at the coupler that attached the adapter to her laptop viciously, rhythmically, while she made her choked little human sounds, until she felt the coupler snap.

Charlie's shop was warm and cluttered. It smelled of cherry syrup or burned rubber, perhaps both. The man who appeared from in back was not Charlie Song, but a younger, stockier fellow with an optimistic expression, which Janie immediately resented. He spoke an earnest, hollow brand of English, customer servicese.

Where's Charlie? Janie said. Who are you?

It occurred to her that she had had too much to drink, though she was, pleasantly, drunk enough to forgive this perception.

The young man pushed up his spectacles. Charlie's gone. May I help you with something?

What do you mean
gone?
Janie said. What does
gone
mean?

He's running an errand. My name is Fred Lui. I'm his associate. Perhaps I can help you with something?

This is sort of a personal problem, Janie said.

Fred cocked his head. Are you alright? he said.

Of course I'm alright. What sort of question is that? I
just need a repair done and Charlie is the one who's done it previously, twice previously, and he asked me specifically, if I needed further assistance, as I understood the arrangement, I was to see him.
Okay
?

Fred held up his hands, as if he were being robbed. Okay, he said.

So Janie sat down amid the dingy keyboards and casings and springs and watched the snow fall on the road crew, who had constructed, by this time, a small crater. The TV monitor was still on the shelf and she glanced a few times at the tiny chlorophylled world which was her world, in which she was tucked, pretty and sad, in a far corner.

It was past five when Charlie appeared and immediately Fred rose from behind the counter and began to speak to him in Chinese—she guessed it was Chinese—and Charlie Song looked utterly ruined, with red bags under his eyes and his worn-out teeth.

Charlie, she said.

He was wearing a cap, some kind of foolish brimmed cap, and when he pulled it off his hair rose up in black clefs.

Problem again? Why problem? I made good repair last time.

Janie straightened the hem of her dress. Yes. Of course you did. Charlie, please. It was my fault. I dropped the machine.

No warranty, Charlie said.

The flecks of snow on his coat had begun to soak through. Janie wanted to throw a shawl over his shoulders.

I was hoping we might discuss this—alone.

Charlie began shaking his head. No. No fix now. Very busy. You come back. January.

But Charlie, you know, I wouldn't ask unless it was an emergency. I'll pay you. I can pay in cash. Janie took a step closer and Charlie backed against the counter.

Holiday, he said.

Janie took another step forward, but Charlie ducked left, toward the back room, all the while shaking his head and saying: Comp USA. They have good technician there.

Please, Janie said. This won't take long.

She began, then, to chase him, around the counter and through the thickets of zip drives and modems. Please. Charlie. Let's not be like this. I just need you—

Something caught in her throat. She was certain her face was a shiny and lurid thing. She'd put on lipstick and too much mascara and she was wearing a gown, a fucking evening gown. The adapter was clutched to her bosom.